THE LIFE WITHIN THE MOUNTAIN
Ten years after first seeing Larung Gar, Jing Wei returns to a changed mountain, finding continuity in faith, memory and the lives held within it.
August 30, 2026
PICTORIAL STORY
PHOTOGRAPHY Jing Wei
WORDS Jing Wei and Melanie Meggs
There is a photograph that circulates before the story does. A mountainside in eastern Tibet, its slopes covered by thousands of small dwellings in deep red, stacked so densely that from a distance they read less as architecture than as texture, like fish scales forming a second skin over the land. This is Larung Gar, one of the largest Tibetan Buddhist academies in the world, and for the photographer Jing Wei, it began exactly this way. Not as a destination she set out towards, but as an image that arrived unexpectedly and would not let her go.
“A friend showed me a photograph of the entire mountainside covered with thousands of red houses, and I was immediately captivated. I had never seen anything like it, and I became intensely curious about the place behind the image.”
Jing did not go to Larung Gar to take a beautiful photograph of a beautiful place. She went to find out what that photograph could not tell her.
What she found, on arrival, undid that photograph entirely. Larung Gar felt almost like another world to Jing. The scale of the landscape was immense, but it was the quieter register beneath its visual prominence that pulled her in, what she describes as daily routines, encounters, gestures, and the ways people lived and practised their faith within this cultural and spiritual landscape. The red houses, it turned out, were only the frame. The picture was the life inside it.
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Jing Wei grew up in Beijing, the daughter of a film art designer whose home doubled as a gallery of borrowed worlds. Through film posters, visual materials and cinema, her father’s work introduced Jing to places she had never experienced. From these images, she absorbed the idea that beyond her city, other lives were unfolding in ways she could not yet imagine. Those images, she says, “opened my imagination and gave me an early desire to go beyond the world I knew.”
Beijing also taught her that the relationship between people and place is not permanent. Traditional neighbourhoods and established ways of living existed alongside redevelopment. Looking back, Jing recognised that “when a place changes, something about the identity and memory of the people who live there can change with it.” This awareness would later inform the questions she brought to Larung Gar.
It is tempting, when writing about a place as visually overwhelming as Larung Gar, to let the landscape do the talking. “My camera became more than a way of making beautiful images,” she writes. “It became a visual documentary tool and a way of creating a bridge between this community and people who might never have the opportunity to experience Larung Gar in person.”
This shift marked the beginning of a long-term commitment. Jing understood that she was not simply photographing a destination, she was photographing a place with a complex cultural and spiritual identity, and a landscape that was not static. What began as curiosity became, in her words, “a responsibility to return, to continue observing, and to document what I could with care and respect.”
That sense of duty is the quiet engine of the whole body of work. As she puts it in her own account of the project, these images “became more than documentary records, they became visual testimonies of a place, a way of life, and a collective memory that can no longer be experienced in the same form.”
Her approach depended upon time and communication. Jing’s Tibetan driver helped her speak with members of the community, drawing upon relationships he had already established. A greeting, eye contact or the decision to wait before raising the camera became part of her method. When photographing a group of monks, she remained among them until her presence became familiar. The image emerged from that period of shared time rather than from an immediate act of observation.
This practice supports Jing’s description of the camera as a way of listening. Listening requires her to resist deciding in advance what another person’s life should mean. “I don’t want to put myself in their shoes and tell their story as if I fully understand it,” she explains. “I want to remain open to what they are willing to reveal.”
Ten years passed between Jing’s first visit and her return in July 2026. The Larung Gar she encountered bore only a partial resemblance to the place she remembered. Demolitions had reshaped parts of the academy, and houses she had once photographed had changed or were no longer there. Visitors now passed through a tourism centre before travelling by bus to a designated viewing area. Access to the academy was restricted, and visitors were no longer permitted to photograph monks.
Jing did not treat these restrictions as obstacles to overcome. She accepted them as part of the conditions under which Larung Gar could now be photographed. Her later images were made from farther away, with people seen from behind, at a distance or situated within the wider landscape. Constraint became composition. The boundary itself entered the frame.
What surprised Jing was not only what had disappeared, but what continued. Within the changed landscape, she could still observe people studying, living communally and practising their faith. This altered her understanding of resilience. The survival of a place, she came to believe, cannot be measured through architecture alone. It may also be sustained through relationships, memories and practices that continue as the physical environment changes.
From this realization came the question Jing now considers central to the project, one she poses as much to herself as to the viewer: What survives when the landscape changes?
Jing Wei is currently pursuing a graduate degree in Arts and Cultural Leadership at the University of Minnesota, and photography remains something she practices alongside that work rather than because of it. She considers the arrangement a freedom rather than a compromise, since it leaves her less tied to commercial expectations, specific subjects, and contracts.
Living between Beijing and Minnesota has made Jing comfortable with occupying the positions of both insider and outsider. In Beijing, she remains connected through personal history, yet distance allows her to return with the perspective of an observer. In Minnesota, she belongs to the community while retaining the awareness of someone shaped elsewhere. Moving between these positions has made her more receptive to different traditions, beliefs and ways of living. She does not require a culture to feel familiar before she can value it. Instead, she approaches difference with curiosity, allowing each encounter to expand how she understands the world and her place within it.
Ask Jing what has held steady across more than a decade behind the camera, and she does not name a style or a subject. She names curiosity, the same instinct that sent her toward a friend’s photograph of a mountain she had never heard of. What she says she has had to give up is any illusion that a photograph’s worth ends with how it looks. She judges an image now by what it might do once it leaves her, whether it can hold a memory that would otherwise fade out, or make visible a life that history was prepared to overlook.
“I still believe photography can preserve human stories and cultural memory and allow experiences that might otherwise be overlooked to be seen and remembered.”
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